THE BBC AND THE ARTS IN THE NATIONS AND REGIONS: IMPARTIALITY - AND EQUALITY? David Anderson, Director General of Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales Introduction I am a passionate supporter of a publicly-funded BBC. Along with the NHS, social care and the state education system, I regard it as one of the four vital pillars of public service on these islands - evidence that democracy works. I was born in Northern Ireland, grew up in the industrial Midlands of England, and went to university in Scotland. For the last four years I have worked in Wales. I have lived in every nation of the United Kingdom. If I ask questions, and challenge practice, it is because I want the BBC to survive and thrive at the centre of public life. It is a beacon of truths in a world of commercial interests. It provides a public space for debate that is vital for our democracy. The culture of any nation or region is an ecosystem, made up of a number of mutually de- pendent parts. As well as arts and cultural institutions, these also include the print and broadcast media, public and private funders, the education sector, the tourism industry and - last but not least - creative industries and individual professionals. Also essential to all of this is the wider community, whose informed support and creative participation is the lifeblood of all cultural activity. A creative economy depends upon a creative society. The nations and regions of the United Kingdom outside London - with the exception, argu- ably, of the central belt in Scotland - do not have all the elements, as described above, that they need to ensure a thriving arts ecosystem. Wales, for example, has very strong resources of talent and great national arts and cultural institutions. Recent reports by Dai Smith, Chair of the Arts Council of Wales, on the posi- tive role of the arts in education, and by Baroness Kay Andrews on the importance of cul- tural participation in overcoming the barriers created by poverty, have demonstrated the value of cultural education in Wales. But Wales, like much of the rest of the United Kingdom, does not get fair media coverage of its arts. Nor do we have the coverage from the UK media that the quality of our arts de- serves. This lack of recognition and publicity from the UK print and broadcasting media - with the credibility that comes with it - in turn makes it still harder for us to attract the public and private funding that we so badly need, to enable us to invest in our programmes and, for example, to provide match funding for Lottery bids. Many of the key decisions that determine support for the arts are made by publicly funded organisations based in London, such as the BBC and Visit Britain. They appear to have little knowledge or understanding of what is happening in the rest of the United Kingdom, and especially the devolved nations. 1 The Arts in England Research by Arts and Business in 20121 revealed that the great majority of funding in the whole of the UK for the arts - over 80% of that from by private donors, over 70% of that from corporations, and over 60% of that from trusts and foundations - went to London insti- tutions. In 2013, an independent report, Rebalancing Our Cultural Capital2, revealed that London- ers benefitted from £69 per head of cultural spending by DCMS and Arts Council England from its public funding, compared with an average of just £4.50 in the rest of England. This year, the same authors published The Place Report3, on Arts Lottery funding of communi- ties across England. This found that institutions located in the City of Westminster alone had received £408 million from the Arts Lottery since 1995, but its citizens had contributed just £14.5 million. This is in addition to the £80 million per annum these arts institutions re- ceive from DCMS, and the £450 million per annum DCMS gives to national museums in England, almost all of which are located in London. At the same time the 33 areas of lowest participation in England, representing 6 million people, received just £288 million over the last 20 years from the Arts Lottery. Yet, just five organisations in London within a mile of each other - the National Theatre, the Royal Opera House, English National Opera, the South Bank Centre and Sadlers Wells - alone have received more from the Arts Lottery (at £315 million) than these 33 low participation areas in England. The local authority area with the poorest return from the Arts Lottery is County Durham, who players have contributed £34 million, while receiving just £12 million. In the United Kingdom we retain the highly centralised 19th century, semi-colonial model that the arts should be concentrated in central London, and that funding London is synon- ymous with serving the English regions and nations. For Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland in particular, this undermines the principles of devolution of culture, embedded in law. It is a constitutional tension that remains unresolved. All the evidence shows that concentration of power and funding in London is, in policy terms, a failure. Participation levels in the arts in London are, if anything, slightly lower than in the rest of England, despite this richness of funding. London-based public institu- tions such as the British Museum, and private arts institutions such as the Royal Academy and Glyndebourne, do not in any substantial or effective way serve England, still less the United Kingdom. Nor, culturally, are they capable of doing so. The Arts Council England's initial response to the two independent reports was to say that the data was wrong. Nothing they have published since has changed the fundamental truth of the reports' analysis. We provide public funding of the arts to correct the inequali- ties of the market, not to deepen it. Yet re-enforcing inequality is what Arts Council Eng- land (ACE), and the Arts Lottery England have been doing for over two decades and more. This is public policy failure on a heroic scale. 1 http://artsandbusiness.bitc.org.uk/research/latest-private-investment-culture-survey-201112 2 http://www.theroccreport.co.uk/ 3 http://www.theplacereport.co.uk/ 2 Funding of arts organisations in England needs root and branch reform, not tinkering, as ACE proposes. ACE promises that, if Arts Lottery funding stays healthy, it will bring access to the arts "as close to home as possible for everyone". In fact, income to the Arts Lottery is currently falling. The media and social justice Is there a connection between rising poverty and social division in the UK, and the policies and practices of the arts and media? Last month, the Open Society Foundations (OSF) published a report on perceptions of working class communities in Higher Blackley in Manchester4 that they are represented in the media as "feckless, lazy scroungers". It found similar patterns in other parts of Europe. White working-class people are often depicted as poor, unsocialised and sometimes vio- lent, says the OSF. The report draws on Nancy Fraser's concept of misrecognition, which she identifies as cul- tural/symbolic injustice that is rooted in social patterns of representation, cultural domina- tion and non-recognition. In other words, misrepresentation of the white working classes in the media is not simply poor journalism that does not reflect communities accurately, but rather it is all part of the unequal society and reproduces this inequality. The Manchester researchers argue that members of the white working class are largely excluded from jobs in the media, and the stereotypes perpetuated there strengthen the perception of the poor deserving their poverty. This perception in itself, the researchers say, affects public policy because decisions are based on the idea that people's circum- stances are the result of their own poor choices, such as poor diet and irresponsible man- agement of personal finances. In Higher Blackley, on the other hand, participants complained of researchers being "all born with a silver spoon in their mouth", and said working class people had little opportuni- ty to correct damaging stereotypes of themselves. Melvyn Bragg has recently spoken out on the same issue. "I'm not a fan of the working class being mocked, including by some of our famous writers … even by those who came from it," he said in an interview with the Radio Times in June 2014. "All this 'it's grim oop North' sort of stuff. Well, it was a joke once, but we've got to the stage where the working class has been turned into a cliche and it deserves a lot better." Bragg didn't name the "famous writers" in the interview, but said that, even if working-class characters were pre- sented as intelligent and educated, this was seen as extraordinary. He added that his own working class childhood, as the son of a publican in the north-west, had a library for books and the radio for drama: "We listened to a lot of drama, adaptations of books, comedy. There was a real love of music expressed in choirs, because you didn't have the instruments except your voice. We lived in a very cultured environment." And last year, Tony Garnett (who directed 'Cathy Come Home') claimed, in the Guardian on 12 April 2013, that realistic dramas about social conditions of working class people of 4 http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/reports/white-working-class-communities-manchester 3 the kind he made would no longer be funded by the BBC, even though the bleak social re- alism he depicted is as relevant now as it was in the early years of his career.